SA’s Broforce and the “tsunami of bromance”

A game which is making some waves internationally is Broforce, and the South African-developed game recently received the thumbs-up on Steam’s Greenlight program.

MyGaming caught up with the bro-tastic devs to find out how the 2D sidescrolling shooter is coming along.

Broforce is described as “a ridiculously violent platform game about being awesome action heroes from the 80s and 90s while slaying satanic terrorists and aliens while unravelling an evil plot to destroy the planet while dealing with being awesome action heroes from the 80s and 90s”, which is alright in our books, and apparently the Steam community agrees; so how exactly did Free Lives react to the news of its success.

“Much high fiving, followed by tequila-fuelled celebrations, followed by a return to familiar panic and workaholic indulgence,” said Free Lives’ Shaz Strauss, producer on Broforce.

“We put Broforce onto Greenlight when both Greenlight and Broforce were very early in development. It took us nearly a year to get Greenlit so while it certainly wasn’t easy, we put in enough work that the campaign went smoothly,” added Strauss.

Free Lives’ Ruan Rothmann (programmer) and Evan Greenwood (creative director) wrote a whole blog piece about the Greenlight experience and some of the challenges faced.

Regarding moving forward, MyGaming asked the Cape Town-based devs whether Valve now gets involved with the distribution and promotion process of the game on Steam.

“We actually don’t know much yet – we received a congratulatory e-mail from them and have been directed to fill in some registration/preliminary paperwork to get the ball rolling,” said Strauss. “So far it’s still very opaque, but maybe after the paperwork wall has been scaled we will have a better idea.”

Broforce will obviously debut on PC, but the Free Lives team did express an interest in making some platform jumps.

“We’ve started communications with Sony, we’d love to launch on Vita and PS,” said Strauss. “Broforce might not quite be suited to mobile platforms (too many explosions), but if we can optimise it enough we might try for there as well.”

With regards to the feedback from fans and the popularity that the game has picked up, MyGaming asked the team if the direction has changed or if the response from gamers has influenced the development in any way.

“The response has been a slow, but steadily increasing wave of positivity. At this point we are utterly been floored by the incredible tsunami of bromance for Broforce. Its really been instrumental to the development of the game,” said Strauss.

“The more support we’ve received, the more we’ve wanted to pour into the game to meet and exceed expectations. It’s been a huge driving force for us. It’s been developing this game in the open and being able to test ideas and mechanics in alpha.”

The state of the SA game development and indie scene is a much-talked about topic, and the Free Lives team sees it as potential-packed, but isolated.

“There are some real quality games being developed and released by the small game dev industry in SA, but the market itself is still pretty negligible. It’s probably fair to say that we all aim at an international market rather than a local one, which is not a bad thing,” explained Strauss.

Free Lives has also given gamers the chance to try out the “Brototype” by heading over to the Free Lives website and trying out the in-development build.